How WordPress-powered P2 is (hopefully) going to leave me more organized and productive!

Ever since I read Matt Mullenweg’s post How P2 Changed Automattic I’ve been thinking about how I could best utilise a similar system. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch this video:

But then it dawned on me this morning: there’s no reason I couldn’t use such a system for private, me-only stuff!

As E-Learning Staff Tutor last year and as Director of E-Learning this year, I’ve been keeping a record of what I’ve been up to. This is as much about me being able to cross-reference stuff as proving to others (if needed) that I’ve been fulfilling my role. Up until now I’ve been using Google Docs, which looks like this:

Now, however, with WordPress, the P2 theme and a plugin called Absolute Privacy, I’ve got a close, web-based system that should hopefully be a lot more flexible and powerful:

Anonymous

I’m interested to know what you think the advantage of this is over some of the standard GTD apps – Things, TheHitList, OmniFocus etc? or the webapps like Remember the Milk?

I have been using the Things iPhone apps for over a year and find this a great way to keep track of all the things that I need to do… Lots of the things that I need to do crop up when I am away from a computer (walking about the school etc) and your solution looks like I would need something else to keep track of things until I have a chance to sit down and add them… Also as @josepicardo points out, can you do scheduled tasks?

I’m just unsure why you would go this route when there are many different GTD systems already available?

I did a very similar thing last year, only instead of using a self-hosted solution, I used a microblogging site called Quillpill.com that, at the time, promoted its main focus as being for diary or record-keeping. I even linked to it in a blog post to share with my readers.

To speak to one part of Andy’s question, a major advantage of using a self-hosted solution as opposed to a web app is that you maintain more control over your data. I had about four months’ worth of reflections & accomplishments in my Quillpill “diary”, but the company apparently disappeared at some point in the last 6-8 months. All that is gone now, and all that’s left of http://www.quillpill.com is a parked page at their former domain.

I’m not suggesting such an event is likely to happen with one of the bigger companies like Microsoft or Google, but it is entirely possible with the smaller web startups. This is one reason I haven’t made the jump to working entirely in the cloud. Rather, I’m mainly interested in combination web apps with desktop companions that synchronize and make information ubiquitously accessible, but also secure in the sense that if, say, Evernote’s servers blew up tomorrow, I still have all my information stored locally. I’m a big fan of apps like XMind, Evernote, Dropbox, and Live Sync for this reason

What Doug proposes, while not a true desktop-web sync-able solution, I think is an improvement over using a web app because WordPress backups are easily created, either manually or automatically via plugins.